The New Yorker:

A judge’s plea, Hillary Clinton invokes the H-word, and a shock poll in the Times.

By Susan B. Glasser 

Donald Trump often takes the breath away with his defiance of the basic norms of American public life. (See: January 6th.) But sometimes it’s the smaller encroachments on decency that serve as a reminder of how far outside the bounds he operates. “Can you control your client?” Judge Arthur Engoron demanded of Trump’s lawyer, during the former President’s testimony on Monday in Manhattan, where he stands accused of running a fraudulent business in the state of New York. “This is not a political rally. This is a courtroom.” Later, after yet another Trump soliloquy in response to a yes-or-no question, Engoron repeated his entreaty. “I beseech you,” the judge said, “to control him if you can.”

Of course, seven years and five months into Trump’s political career, we know by now that there is no controlling Trump. And yet, exactly a year before Election Day, that rogue defendant in the dock is not only the presumptive Republican nominee but running in a dead heat with Joe Biden nationally and, if the shock poll that came out in the Times a day before Trump’s testimony is to be believed, ahead of him in five of six must-win battleground states. Trump’s lawyer Christopher Kise even bragged about this in Engoron’s courtroom, citing the poll as he referred to his client as “the future President of the United States.” The poll’s release quickly sent Democratic Washington into a vaporous state of preëmptive blame-gaming about the status of the race: It’s Biden’s age. It’s his campaign. It’s the media’s fault. It’s all of the above. One anonymous sniper told NBC News that the campaign needed a “defibrillator.” The former Obama adviser David Axelrod even kinda, sorta, maybe suggested that Biden should consider stepping aside as the Party’s 2024 standard-bearer. The White House sought to downplay the fuss as the inevitable outcry from the Party’s large class of professional “bed wetters.” Perhaps, one Democratic strategist insisted, albeit anonymously, to the Washington Post, some bed-wetting was in order: “We should be terrified about what might happen.”

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